F1’s Mosley shot himself after his cancer diagnosis
FORMULA 1 boss Max Mosley was found dead with a gunshot wound to his head after being diagnosed with terminal cancer, an inquest heard.
The former president of the motorsport governing body FIA died at his west London home last May, aged 81.
A neighbour and his housekeeper called 999 after they discovered a note on his bedroom door stating ‘do not enter, call the police’.
Officers found his body on his bed with injuries consistent with a gunshot.
A suicide note on his bedside table was barely legible due to the large amount of blood, but police could make out the words ‘I had no choice’, Westminster coroner’s court heard.
Mr Mosley, who was receiving palliative care for chronic bladder and bowel pain, had been told he had weeks to live.
Neighbour Henry Alexander said: ‘He had an aggressive form of cancer and had been down.
‘He said he’d had enough. We had been talking about the upcoming operation and he said he couldn’t face it.’
Det Con Ben Benlounes confirmed there were no signs of forced entry and that Mr Mosley had a firearms licence with four guns in the property.
Dr Christopher McNamara, a consultant haemotologist who first saw Mr Mosley in October 2019, said: ‘Max had a terminal illness and accepted this would not be cured.’
Emma Mosley said her father-in-law was an amateur racing car driver who ‘identified his major achievement as FIA president, the promotion of road safety... and the increased safety and use of green technologies in Formula 1’.
Mr Mosley, a qualified barrister, was a controversial figure who campaigned for stricter control of the media after the News of the World published photos and a video of him at a sadomasochistic orgy with five prostitutes in 2008.
His parents were jailed when he was a baby over Nazi sympathies. His dad Sir Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists, married his mum Lady Diana in 1936 at the home of Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels, with Hitler present. The inquest continues.